Overview of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG9

This material is excerpted from a report prepared by the WG9
Convener in answer to a JTC1 action item requesting an explanation
of the market relevance of all JTC1 standardization efforts.

Ada was originally developed in response to a need of the U. S.
Department of Defense to reduce the number of High Order Languages
(HOL) used in its systems. The specific requirements for the language
emphasized high reliability, programming-in-the-large and support
for real-time systems. The original Ada 87 language contains features
supporting these requirements to a degree still unmatched by other
HOLs. The Ada 95 revision added strong support for object-oriented
(OO) programming, becoming the first internationally standardized
OO language.

Ada's success in the U.S. DoD has been remarkable. The estimated
number of HOLs used in DoD systems has declined from roughly 450
(in 1976) to roughly 37 (in 1996). Ada is now the most widely-used
language in DoD embedded real-time applications, amounting to
about 50 million source lines, and is number 2 (behind Cobol)
in DoD information system applications.

Outside the defense sector, Ada's use has been more limited and
primarily concentrated in areas where reliability, large systems,
or real-time factors are important. For example, IBM evaluated
and rated Ada above C, Pascal, Jovial and Fortran for use in programming
its U. S. Air Traffic Control (ATC) applications. (An SEI study
compared Ada and C++ with similar results.) Ada is also being
applied to ATC development in Europe and Canada. Both in North
America and Europe, Ada is arguably the language of choice (or,
at least, a strong contender) for highly reliable, large, complex
applications. These application domains take advantage of the
rigorous specification of the Ada standard.

Other example applications include:

Avionics applications in the US (Boeing 777), Europe (Airbus
320) and Russia (BE-200)

Train control for the Swiss railroad and the French TGV and
Astree as well as urban rail systems in Paris, Cairo, Calcutta
and Hong Kong

The US Global Positioning System

Electronic Funds Transfer for the Swiss PTT

Medical analysis devices in Germany and the US

Steel manufacturing process control in the US

Automobile plant floor control in UK, Sweden and France

Electrical distribution monitoring in Switzerland

VLSI design tools in France and CAD systems in France and Germany

Mobile communication systems for Inmarsat

Radio telescope control in Finland

Astrophysical spectral analysis and modeling in Austria

Laser fusion experiment control at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory

Real-time video production and editing in the US

Interest in Ada from the educational sector is growing. A 1996
survey in the US show 345 colleges, universities, commercial and
governmental institutions offered 656 college-equivalent courses
in Ada.

The newsletter of the Ada Information Clearinghouse has a circulation
of nearly 22,000 with nearly 50% of the readers holding positions
in commercial corporations.

The US market for Ada tools and compilers is estimated to be about
$200 million annually -- again, small compared to C but nevertheless
significant in absolute terms.

It is estimated that approximately 5% of professional programmers
in the US are Ada programmers and that about 3% of all function
points in the US are programmed in Ada. Although the percentages
are low compared with C, the absolute magnitudes of these numbers
are huge. Market share statistics are probably less relevant,
however, than consideration of the high importance of the applications
for which Ada is used, applications demanding the utmost of reliability,
often to protect human life. It is for this reason that the use
of Ada is directed or encouraged by defense and other governmental
agencies in several countries.

Furthermore, the existence of an international standard is vital
to this usage. More than any other programming language, the users
of Ada employ the standard itself as their basic reference to
the language. The Ada marketplace has placed great importance
on the existence of an unusually detailed validation suite that
is driven by the specification of the standard. Vendors and users
of Ada maintain a continuing and frequent dialog with SC22/WG9
in order to ensure that interpretations of the language standard
are applied uniformly and that code is highly portable. In fact,
the highly rigorous standardization of the language and the continuing
maintenance of that standard is often cited as one of the "selling
points" of the Ada language. The high degree of collaboration
between the marketplace and WG9 is one of the great successes
of JTC1 standardization efforts.

Standards related to the Ada language are assigned to ISO/IEC
JTC1 SC22/WG9. Completed standards are assigned labels such as
the one for the Ada language itself, ISO/IEC 8652:1995. A completed
document can be either an international standard (IS) or a technical
report (TR). While under development, documents progress through
a sequence of stages until they are finally approved. In order
from beginning to end, the stages can be labeled as follows:

PNWI - Preliminary New Work Item

NP - New Work Item Proposal

NWI - New Work Item assigned to a Working Group, in this case WG9

WD - Working Draft of the standard prepared by the Working Group

CD Reg - Committee Draft Registration, signifying that
the working draft has been registered with the parent subcommittee,
in this case SC22